Beloved, Trauma and the long road to freedom.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a very powerful novel. A novel about slavery, about memory, but most importantly, about trauma. The novel features Sethe, a woman who escaped from slavery, as its protagonist. Throughout the novel, in interaction with other characters, the reader learns more of Sethe’s history. Sethe was born into slavery and spent a good portion of her life living and working as a slave. It is under slavery that she marries Halle and has four children with him. When Sethe is pregnant with her fourth daughter, they all decide to try to escape the plantation Sweet Home. The plan does not work for all slaves, but Sethe manages to make it out, and finds her way to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. Sethe is free for about a month, before the white man, Schoolteacher, comes to take her back to Kentucky. When Sethe recognises his hat, she does not think, but gathers her children and attempts to kill them in order to protect them from being taken back into slavery. This attempt only succeeded on one of the four children, Sethe’s daughter, who had no name yet. The fact that she murdered her own daughter, coupled with all the trauma’s Sethe endured during her time as a slave constitutes such a traumatic memory, that Sethe has no choice but to repress this memory completely, and with it several others. Sethe manages to stay alive, but only by keeping the past at bay. In the beginning of the novel, Paul D comes back into Sethe’s life, and together they begin the long, painful journey of working through their repressed memories. The novel Beloved contains several stories. The story of Sethe and Paul D working through their repressed memories among them. It is this story that stands at the centre of this essay.

An important theory used to analyse the novel in this manner is trauma theory. Trauma theory first emerged after the First World War, albeit under a different name. During the 1990’s, trauma theory was developed, initially with specific focus on the Holocaust Survivors. In the introduction to Acts of Memory, Mieke Bal introduces several concepts of memory, such as habitual memory, narrative memory and trauma(tic) recall.[1] Memory is a representation of a past event, it is not the event itself; the event took place in the past. The memory of the event is not the event itself. Bal conceptualizes memory as cultural memory, as she believes that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon, as well as an individual or social one. Cultural memory connects the past to the present and the future, as the memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves a lot of different purposes.[2] According to Mieke Bal, there are three kinds of memory: habitual memory, narrative memory and trauma(tic) recall. Habitual memory are the most basic forms of knowledge: don’t step in a puddle, or you’ll get wet feet, you’ll catch a cold, and then trouble begins. These kinds of memory serve to help the subject survive in a society where the behaviour informed by these memories are a part of life. Narrative memory is more advanced than habitual memory: they are affectively coloured, linked to an aura of emotion that makes them memorable. Narrative memory offers a narrative to be told, including high and low accents, background and foreground as well as climatic events. These forms of memory are active and are situated in the present. The third kind of memory has a more problematic relationship with memory: trauma(tic) recall. During traumatic recall, the subject experiences a painful resurfacing of events of a traumatic nature. These events of a traumatic nature have a persistent presence, they remain present for the subject with particular vividness and/or resist integration into the life narrative. There are two common ways of dealing with memories of a traumatic nature: the subject either represses these memories, or dissociates them.[3]

            When the subject represses memory, the memories are pushed down in a vertically layered model of mind. Because of this, the subject no longer has access to the memories. The only indications to their existence are symbolic, indirect indications. With dissociation, the subject pushes memory aside in a horizontally layered model of mind. The memories are contained within a different stream of consciousness. The subject has no access to it, except during traumatic re-enactments.[4] During traumatic re-enactments, the subject is not in control of her ‘memories’, even though at some point in the past, the event happened to her, it is not hers to master. This ensures that traumatic recall, unlike narrative memory, is a solitary event. It is a kind of memory which is inflexible and invariable, while narrative memories are created in connection to others, and vary over time.[5] In order for the traumatic event to be able to enter into memory, it needs to be made narratable. This can only be done in interaction with others: a second, willing, person is needed for the subject to be able to bear the past.[6]

Beloved opens in 1873, with a short description of the haunted house that is 124. The protagonist of the novel is Sethe, who is raising her daughter Denver in an atmosphere of stagnant grief.[7] The two of them have come to accept what drove Sethe’s two sons away from home: the spiteful baby ghost, whose presence is known through clashing of pots and furniture, pools of red light by the doorway and tiny handprints in the cake. Into this house comes Paul D, one of the men who Sethe knows from her childhood at the Sweet Home slave plantation. His arrival changes the ‘climate of repression’: he fights of the ghost, driving it out of the house. Both Sethe and Paul D’s history contains many trauma’s, and the only way for both of them to be able to survive, escape, keep going, was to repress these trauma’s. Together, Paul D and Sethe begin the long road of working through their trauma’s, in the hopes of being able to build a future together.[8]

            Throughout the novel, there are many references to memory, rememory, disremembering and trauma. The structure of the novel itself corresponds to Sethe’s ritual of healing, transforming her traumatic memories into narratable stories.[9] The first part of the novel, Sethe represses the memories that have occurred from the traumas of slavery. Every character in the novel who has experienced slavery in a way represses their traumas. Sethe tells Baby Suggs, when she complains about forgetting everything about her children, other than the fact that one of her daughters loved the burnt bottom of the bread, that this little fact is all she lets herself remember.[10] This is how repression of memory works: the traumas are too horrible to remember, and thus the mind focusses on insignificant details. Unfortunately, the mind is also devious. Even though Sethe “worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe”,[11] memories of Sweet Home, the slave plantation where she spent a part of her life keeps coming up into memory. When she remembers the plantation, she remembers the beauty of the place, the beautiful trees, not the faces of the boys who hung from them.[12] The morning after her first night with Paul D, Sethe gives herself some time to lay in bed and think about planning a future. It was the first time in eighteen years, since her most repressed trauma, that she could wonder about what this word could mean. “Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made – getting away from Sweet Home – went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.”[13] This shows clearly Sethe’s fear about making plans: the attempt to escape Sweet Home plantation had cost too much, and now she is too afraid to ever attempt such a thing again. Only now, she has Paul D to rely on, and she does not have to fight alone anymore. Merely wondering about what making plans could mean, is a luxury Sethe did not have in eighteen years. This shows that Paul D’s presence, the opportunities to talk about Sweet Home with him, and have an understanding listener in him, opens up the opportunity of healing, of working through the traumas of the past. A bit further in the novel, Paul D asks Sethe how things are “inside”. Sethe answers, “I don’t go inside”.[14] Sethe means to say that the future, for her, means keeping the past at bay.[15] She does not want to remember, she wants to keep her daughter safe from the past, and she just wants to keep going. Paul D promises that he will catch her if she falls, and that he will hold on to her ankles, should she wish to go inside. He’ll hold her ankles and make sure she’s able to find her way out again. “We can make a life girl. A life.”[16] Despite the hope Sethe felt earlier about the opportunity to make plans, she’s still scared to go into her past, to deal with it. She does, however, agree to leave some of it to Paul D and see how it goes. The three of them go to the carnival, and when they return, a fully clothed woman was sitting on the stump in front of their house. Their dog, Here Boy, was nowhere in sight.[17] The girl’s name is Beloved, which is the only word Sethe was able to get on her baby girl’s headstone. The girl turns out to be an incarnation of the baby ghost who haunted 124 with such enormous spite in the beginning of the novel. Denver immediately takes to Beloved, taking care of her in the days after her arrival, when the girl seems to be sick. Once she has recuperated, Beloved is unable to take her eyes off of Sethe.  Beloved longs to be reunited with her mother with all the intensity of a two-year-old.[18] Denver discovers Beloved’s sweet tooth, and Sethe discovers that telling Beloved stories was a way to ‘feed’ her. The first time Beloved asks about the past, by asking about Sethe’s diamonds that used to hang from her ears, Sethe tells her. When telling the story, Sethe is surprised to find that she enjoys telling the stories, that the pain that was usually there when others, Denver or Paul D, asked about it, was gone. When telling Beloved about the earrings, Sethe finds that she wants to talk about it, that she even likes it. She can’t explain why it is, but she enjoys telling Beloved about her past.[19] In this manner, Beloved’s return forces Sethe out of her stagnant mourning, into the work of dealing with the past.[20] Through Beloved’s questions, bit by bit, Sethe begins the hard work of making her past narratable, integrating it into her life narrative.

            However, this does not mean that Sethe is now fully able to deal with the past. The process of working through traumas is a long and hard one, and she has just begun. In a later discussion with Paul D, Sethe finally learns why her husband, Halle, never came to join her in Cincinnati. This was another trauma of Sethe, and initially she recoils from hearing it. She leaves the house to go and sit on the front porch, trying to physically get away from her rebellious mind and its hunger for more. Because even though, Sethe does not want to know what happened to Halle, she needs to know. She needs to know in order to begin to process this trauma. Talking about what happened the last time Paul D saw Halle leads to one of Paul D’s traumas. He tells Sethe about it as good as he can, while Sethe rubs his knee. She thinks that it is “just as well,” that he stopped talking. “Saying more would push them both to a place they couldn’t come back from”.[21] A few days later, Sethe finds herself torn between the present and the future, and the past. She has always only been able to think about the future, to keep living in the past, by keeping the past at bay. But since Paul D’s and Beloved’s arrival, more of her past has been remembered than in the eighteen years before. In search of some guidance, Sethe decides to go to the clearing where Baby Suggs used to call all the former slaves together and teach them to love themselves. Sethe sits on the foot of the stone where Baby Suggs used to do the calling, reminiscing about the past. Just as she decides to share this past with Paul D, Beloved’s massaging fingers turn into a choking grip.[22] This symbolizes the past’s choking hold over Sethe. Each time she has a little hope for the future, the past sneaks back in and reminds her why it’s a bad idea to have any hope at all. When Paul D finds out what Sethe did to her children eighteen years ago, he first asks her about it. She is unable to tell him, circling around the room and the subject. The readers learn the story of Sethe and her children through a flashback. Paul D cannot deal with this story, with the horror of what happened, and leaves 124.[23] The incident that Sethe is unable to tell Paul D about, is her most repressed memory. She knows it is there through symbolic, indirect indications.

            This is where the second part of the novel begins. In this part, Sethe’s painful reconciliation with the past begins. She finally realizes that Beloved is indeed her baby girl returned to her in the flesh, and relieved sees this as a form of forgiveness. While Sethe is at work, she cannot wait to be home, to be with Beloved. In her mind, on her way back, Sethe thinks of all she wants to tell Beloved. She wants to tell Beloved everything, every incident, every trauma that led up to that day in the Cold House, when the Schoolteacher came to Cincinnati to take them back to Kentucky. Sethe focusses all her energy on Beloved, on loving her, taking care of her. “I’ll tend to her as no mother ever tended to a child, a daughter”.[24] Throughout the second part of the novel, a merging of sort takes place. First Sethe, Denver and Beloved each have their own distinctive chapter to articulate their thoughts, but this is followed by a chapter in which it is harder to discern who thinks what. The three woman seem to merge into a single being, submerging themselves completely in the grip of the past. Sethe is so desperate to explain her actions to Beloved, that she is unable to accept that the past is in the past, and allows herself to be completely submerged by the past.[25] In a sense, Beloved is her mother’s greatest treasure and her most painful memory.[26] The fact that she has returned forces Sethe to deal with some painful truths, and while doing so, Sethe loses sight of the present.

            In the third part of the novel, Beloved has made a radical change. No longer the sweet, doting daughter, she has now become insatiable, as nothing is able to make reparations for her death.[27] Denver leaves the house in search for a job and, indirectly, help for her mother. Ever since the incident in the clearing, where Beloved nearly choked her mother to death, Denver has realized that Beloved could be a danger to her mother, instead of the other way around as she initially feared. Beloved grows “plumper by the day”, while Sethe diminishes emotionally and physically.[28] Beloved’s body grows as she feeds off of the horrible memories of her mother.[29] Soon, word spreads through the town of the girl come back from the dead that’s hurting Sethe in a bad way. Even though the town dislikes her to a certain point, they decide that it is time to save Sethe from the ghost of the past.

            It is important to note that the town did not necessarily hate Sethe, as that she constituted a sort of trauma for them. Following a lavish party a month after Sethe’s arrival that every member of the town contributed to and enjoyed, people started to resent Baby Suggs, wondering where she got all the food and stuff for the party from. Even though she shared everything she had with the community, there was a sense of resentment among the community. It was this resentment that ensured they did not warn Sethe and Baby Suggs about the rumours of a white man looking for his runaway slaves in the area.[30] When Sethe finally recognised a certain hat, it was too late, and she could only think of one, horrible way to keep her children safe from the horrors of slavery. Sethe’s worst trauma was, indirectly, allowed to happen by the resentful silence of the community. After Sethe got out of jail, she might have acted prideful, but so did the community. And so, both went their separate ways without ever speaking to each other again.

            Still, when the women of the community learned that Sethe was being haunted by the past, physically, they came together in order to put a stop to it. “Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present”.[31] The women of the town walk together to 124, which lays on the outskirts of town. Together they commence in common prayer, which then turns into a ritual older than words. In the end, it is the communal action of the women which brings change.[32] The women chanting is what eventually draws Sethe and Beloved out into the doorway of their house. For Sethe, the chanting brings back memories of the clearing. The women of the town instantly recognise Sethe and are surprised by the lack of fear on her face, considering they believe the devil-child to be standing next to her. “The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun, thunderblack and glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of her hear twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling”.[33] In the novel, Beloved embodies the guilt and suffering of the past, but also the power and beauty of the future. She also embodies the realization that the past needs to be put in order fully to bring forth the future, pregnant with possibilities.[34] Beloved disappears as a white man enters the scene. He is there to pick Denver up for work, but Sethe does not know this. All she knows is that he is there to claim Denver, and instead of raising her hand to Denver, she grabs a hold of the ice pick in her apron and turns to fight the white man. This re-enactment of Sethe’s deepest trauma completes the psychological cleansing that the singing of the women had already begun. Beloved disappears, and Sethe is finally free for the first time.

            In conclusion, the novel contains many different stories, but most importantly shows Sethe’s healing ritual through talking. She narrates different parts of her history throughout the novel, and as she does this, she unlocks new memories. In the final part of the book, she loses sight of the present, allowing the past to completely submerge her and wear her out, emotionally and physically. With the final re-enactment of her trauma, Sethe is able to make the unspoken incident narratable afterwards. In a sense, Beloved’s return to her mother was therapeutic.[35] Initially she helped her mother make her past more narratable, and in the end, she forms the link that brings Sethe back to her community, to her friends and to a new and hopeful future with Paul D and Denver.

Bibliography

Bal, Mieke, ‘Introduction’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe, Leo Spitzer (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover and London 1999).

Barnett, Pamela E., ‘Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved’, PLMA 112 (1997) 418-427.

Dobbs, Cynthia, ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited’, African American Review 32 (1998) 563-578.

Jesser, Nancy, ‘Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, African American Review 33 (1999) 325-345.

Krumholz, Linda, ‘The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, African American Review 26 (1992) 395-408.

Morrison, Toni, Beloved (London 2016).

Osagie, Iyunolu, ‘Is Morrison Also among the Prophets?: “Psychoanalytic” Strategies in Beloved’, African American Review 28 (1994) 423-440.

Parker, Emma, ‘A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”’, Twentieth Century Literature 47 (2001) 1-19.

Rody, Caroline, ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, “Rememory,” and a “Clamor for a Kiss”’, American Literary History 7 (1995) 92-119.